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Sundar Pichai
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Sources with Alex Heath · Sundar Pichai on what's next for Google Gemini, Waymo, and data…
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How Many Paid Rides Does Waymo Do Each Week?
Sundar Pichai says Waymo just crossed half a million paid rides per week. The team is focused on scaling that number. A Toronto launch is coming, and 10 new cities are on the plan for this year.
Alex Heath asked whether Waymo keeps partnerships such as Uber, runs a fully owned fleet, or someday sells cars a person could rent out. Sundar Pichai says the space is far from zero-sum and still early. He expects many applications for autonomous driving, and he expects Waymo to work in a myriad of ways, including with other partners. He expects those partners to do well as companies on their own.
Over the next 12 months he expects more of that scaling: international markets, other weather, and hi
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Why Is Google Putting AI Data Centers in Space?
Sundar Pichai says Project Suncatcher is Google's pilot, with Planet Labs and SpaceX, for AI data centers in space. Alex Heath asked whether it was still up. Sundar Pichai says it is doing well, he watched the launch, and he expects a chance to say hello to the TPUs.
He compares the bet to starting Waymo. He remembers flying to the desert for the Stanley car in the DARPA challenge, when today's Waymo would have sounded like science fiction. A 10 to 20 year span is a long time, he says, and a world-class team taking the early steps of a deep commitment will hit milestones.
The reason to go now is energy. Sun-synchronous orbits give access to power 24 hours a day. Earth has limited physical
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Why Is Google Investing After Free Cash Flow Went Negative?
Sundar Pichai says the resolve to keep investing comes from the strength and durability of demand, from consumer products through to enterprise. Alex Heath said Google went cash-flow negative over the summer for the first time since the IPO, and Sundar Pichai confirmed it was free cash flow.
He says a bet of this size needs confidence at several levels. Google is seeing robust demand across that range, and it has its own demand signal from how Google uses AI. Separately, internal evals show the capability curve, including how new models compare with older ones. Asked whether Gemini 5.0 will be much better than Argon, he says yes. Google is also signing durable long-term contracts with commi
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Why Did Google Change Who Runs DeepMind?
Sundar Pichai says Google changed who runs frontier models at DeepMind because that work has become an all-consuming job of its own. It is moving, it is picking up pace, and it runs from data to compute to the algorithms to the teams and the model agents.
Jeff Dean spent 27 years at Google. Sundar Pichai says he is proud of that work, Jeff Dean wanted to go build something he was excited about with a set of people, and Google is excited to see what he does with Discovery Loop.
Demis Hassabis has been thinking about this frontier moment for a long time. Sundar Pichai says Demis Hassabis wants more of his time on getting through it safely and on applying AI to other problems, the work behind
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How Many Tokens Did Gemini 4 Use in 72 Hours?
Sundar Pichai says Gemini 4 Argon drew almost 25 trillion tokens in the first 72 hours after launch, about 3 times what Gemini 3.0 saw in that same window. The launch is capacity constrained. Customer feedback has been really good, and he still wants the model to get better at coding. Google's engineers have loved using it internally, and the team keeps shipping refinements from that use.
Alex Heath asked how Google gates a model this large and expensive to serve. Sundar Pichai says Google distilled the Gemini 3.0 models into versions that are nearly as capable and much more efficient, and that work is underway for Gemini 4 so more people can use it. At launch, Google opened Argon to all Ul
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When Will Quantum Have Practical Commercial Uses?
Sundar Pichai says he genuinely sees practical commercial applications for quantum in a five-year time frame. If he were sitting in a chair five years out, the Google Cloud team would be negotiating deals on quantum deployments at some scale, the way Google provides TPU pods today.
He frames robustly scaling up quantum systems, with a view toward commercial applications, as almost a 10-year time frame. The future possibilities of quantum are both vast and, in some ways, uncertain. Practical commercial applications inside five years are the ones he says Google would get excited by.
Sundar Pichai says quantum is another technology Google has been committed to for a long time, and he expects
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Why Do AI Agents Use Web Browsers?
Sundar Pichai says agents will keep using browsers and computers because a person would do the same thing, and because that makes it easier to keep the user in the loop. Agent protocols will develop at the same time.
Alex Heath asked whether the web needs to change so agents can finish tasks, and whether Google is in a position to do something bigger. Sundar Pichai calls the moment complex. Agents working at scale means many parts of the economy have to interoperate in a way that makes sense for all the players. He says the technology frontier will be ahead of the ecosystem. Momentum is already behind MCP, other agent protocols, and payment protocols like UCP, which Google did with a set of
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Who Still Makes Google's Compute Decisions?
Sundar Pichai says the big compute decisions are still made by people in the loop, including him. He already runs internal agents that brief him on the model development arc and on how compute gets used.
He says catching the last 24 hours across pre-training chat groups, mid-training chat groups, and post-training data could easily take an hour a day. Agents now summarize that flow and bring it to him, and he still goes deeper often. Separate agents watch telemetry on compute usage by product area, efficiency, and utilization, and give him inputs and insights. Alex Heath asks whether any near-term future has AI making the compute decisions. Sundar Pichai says that even five years ago they u
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How Do Google Researchers Co-work With Models?
Sundar Pichai says Google is definitely at a stage where AI researchers co-work with the models in a deep way. A lot of humans stay in the loop because of the safety aspects.
The models are involved and maybe suggesting recipes, and they automatically evaluate next checkpoints. He says there is a healthy amount of models and researchers co-working. Some aspects of the pipeline are probably closer to recursive self-improvement, some are less so, and the whole continuum is shifting. Pichai expects the next 12 months to see continued acceleration because of recursive self-improvement.
He says it is important to think about how Google develops the frontier while moving through that shift.